Letting the Air out of the Balloon (Before it Pops!)

Sometimes Big Problems Can Be Solved With Just A Heads-up.

Take “Steve” for example. Normally the leading salesman for a major medical supplier, a combination of bad weather, customer management changes out of his control, and some unexpected family medical bills have dampened his sales and put him on edge. Fortunately, his perseverance is paying off and he is looking forward to some big commissions in his next paycheck.

When that payday email finally arrives, he excitedly opens the link to see… less than half of what he expected. Ten seconds later his blood pressure is through the roof, he’s feeling cheated, and shouting at Chris the commission administrator. What went wrong?

Don’t leave your staff in the dark about their progress and pay. Create clear communication between employer and employee by implementing preliminary payout reports.

According to a USA Today article How does the average American spend their paycheck? “the average household spends more than 90% of their income.” Employees rely on a steady salary to pay for food, housing, health care, transportation, and other miscellaneous purchases. This leaves a small percentage to be stored in a savings account or used for unexpected incidents. Companies without commission tracking software to update employees like Steve on their sales payments are leaving their staff vulnerable to financial disaster. It is easy for people to think that they may not be getting what they believe they deserve, or unable to make their payments, which can put a person under a lot of stress. If the pressure builds up too much it will burst (much like a balloon) leaving management to deal with disgruntled employees and lower performance.

What Really Happened?

It turns out that in Steve’s case, the commission calculations were correct, but the customer made some last-minute order changes that caused the biggest expected commissions to just miss the current pay deadline. Had Steve known that in advance, he would have avoided such an unpleasant surprise, could have planned for the delay, and he and Chris would still be on speaking terms.

Why didn’t Steve see a preliminary report in time to better prepare? It sounds simple enough, but without sales commission software set up, commission administrators are left to crunch numbers up until the last minute. When commission cycle deadlines go right up against the wire, there is often no time to give salespeople better visibility into what they can expect to be paid before they see it on the check.

Core Commissions automates the time-consuming manual work of running a commission cycle, reducing the processing and reporting time by days or even weeks. That allows preliminary reports to be released to sales people within minutes of processing, allowing them time to ask questions and possibly fix identified problems in time to make the upcoming pay cycle.

Communication Is Key

Don’t leave your staff in the dark about their progress and pay. Create clear communication between employer and employee by implementing preliminary payout reports. An automated commission tracking software like Core Commissions takes all the hard work out of providing this critical information for the sales staff. Core’s commission software dashboard allows employees to track performance measures by any category: region, salesperson, customer, and product, just to name a few. Core even provides an online portal for sales staff to login and look up individualized reports on performance and quota attainment. Try out Core’s preliminary payout reports by Scheduling a demo.